by Peter James
‘He wants to pay.’
According to the law, although blackmail was a criminal offence, paying a ransom was not. If someone wanted to pay a ransom demand, they were free to do so, and there was nothing the police could do to stop them.
‘Tell him he’s crazy if he does. They’re not going to stop at £250k, they’re just testing the water.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Branson asked.
‘Because no one’s going to go to this amount of trouble for peanuts, matey. Risk fifteen years in jail for pocket money?’
‘It’s all relative,’ Branson replied. ‘To someone who’s chopping up his door frames to keep warm in winter, £250k is a fortune, right?’
‘Maybe, but it worries me. There’s something very amateurish about the amount. Explain to Brown and his wife that if they pay this ransom money, it may not be the end. There’s likely to be another demand. Then another. His kidnappers believe Mungo’s father is a rich man with deep pockets.’
‘And how do I explain that if he doesn’t pay, his son might die, boss?’
‘Very simply. They’ve done all this, risking a decade or longer in jail for the money. They’re going to be after bigger bucks than 250 grand. Just tell him to play the long game. If Mungo dies, what do the kidnappers have? Nothing but a murder investigation, with the odds against them. We catch around ninety per cent of all killers in the UK, year on year. Tell Kipp Brown to keep them sweet, to say he’s going to download the Bitcoin app. Play for time. Meanwhile, let’s see what our good friend – not – Mr Dervishi has to say.’
He looked at Norman Potting and Velvet Wilde.
Then he was interrupted as his phone rang. It was his boss, ACC Cassian Pewe. And he was incandescent with rage.
‘Roy,’ he said. ‘Just what is going on? A bomb scare at the Amex, a kidnapped boy and now a dismembered body at a crushing plant. Meantime you are watching footy and playing lunatic heroics while you’re supposed to be the on-call SIO. I want to see you first thing tomorrow, in my office, 9 a.m., and you’d better have some bloody good answers for me.’
Grace was well aware his actions at the Amex had given Pewe the excuse to discipline him that he had long looked for. But right now, he did not care.
‘Yes, sir,’ he replied.
Fuck you, he thought.
51
Saturday 12 August
22.30–23.30
‘So what made you join the police?’ Norman Potting asked his colleague, seated beside him, as he drove the unmarked Ford up the hill, heading towards the east of the city.
‘My dad was a police officer in Belfast,’ Velvet Wilde said in her Northern Irish accent, the smell of pipe smoke on Potting’s clothes reminding her of him. ‘He was killed by a car bomb during the Troubles. I made the decision that as soon as I was old enough, I would do something to stand up against any kind of tyranny or intimidation.’
‘I like feisty women,’ Potting said. ‘Good on you.’
She said nothing.
Potting was silent for a beat. Street lights flashed by, overhead, briefly illuminating their faces. ‘Like I said,’ he repeated, ‘I like feisty women.’
‘I’m sure Brighton is full of them, gagging to get laid by you.’
He smiled. ‘Are you allowed to say that these days with all the political correctness about workplace harassment?’
‘You know what, Norman, so far as I’m concerned most of it is absolute bollocks.’
‘I agree with you, Velvet. So would you permit me to tell you that you’re a very attractive lady?’
‘Well, that’s what my partner tells me,’ she said.
‘Ah.’ Potting nodded. ‘He’s a lucky man. What’s his name?’
‘Julia.’
There was a long silence. ‘Right,’ Potting said, clumsily.
‘I understand your fiancée was a police officer who died in a fire,’ she said.
He nodded, gloomily. ‘Bella. She was the love of my life.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you.’ He shrugged. ‘You’re happy with Julia?’
‘She’s the love of my life. Very happy.’
‘You’re lucky.’
‘I am.’
The satnav indicated half a mile to their destination. They were high up above the cliffs of East Brighton and in daytime they would have had commanding views, to their right, across the English Channel. Now it was a vast, inky blackness.
‘I heard that Detective Superintendent Grace lost the love of his life, too,’ DC Wilde suddenly said.
‘Well, he’s very happily married now,’ Potting replied, guardedly. ‘He lost his first wife but I couldn’t say whether she was the love of his life.’
‘How did he lose her – what was her name – Sandy?’
‘He doesn’t talk about her much. As I understand, they married when he was quite young. Then he came home, on the evening of his thirtieth birthday, after they’d been married ten years, to find she had vanished.’
‘Vanished?’
‘Into thin air. No note or message. He came home to take her out for a birthday dinner and she wasn’t there. I think they found her car at Gatwick Airport, but there were no transactions on her credit cards, nothing. He spent ten years looking for her – I heard he even consulted mediums.’ He shrugged. ‘Eventually he had her declared legally dead and married a lovely lady, Cleo, who runs the Brighton and Hove Mortuary. They have a baby son, Noah.’
‘She is so nice – I’ve met her. And did he ever find out what happened to his wife?’
‘Only very recently. Sandy was in a coma after being hit by a taxi in Munich and then died – leaving behind a ten-year-old son he never knew existed.’
‘His son?’
‘As I understand.’
‘God,’ she said. ‘How does he cope with that – how does his new wife?’
‘He doesn’t talk about his personal life much. Not at work, anyhow. But I’ve known him a long time – he’s pretty resourceful.’
She shook her head. ‘None of us ever knows what’s around the corner, do we?’
‘That’s why we do this job,’ Norman Potting said.
‘Because we don’t know what’s around the corner?’ She looked puzzled.
‘Exactly.’
‘In what sense?’
He pulled out his warrant card. ‘One day, when you’re as old as I am, you’ll understand. This card, this job, it lets us see around blind corners. Whether we like the view or not.’
‘We’re not about to like the view ahead, right?’
Norman Potting shook his head. ‘That’s never an option. We don’t like or dislike. We just do what we do. Roy Grace says all we can do as police officers is to try to lock up the villains and make the world a slightly better place.’
‘And do we?’
‘Lock the villains up? Or make the world a better place?’ he asked.
‘Make the world a better place.’
‘I think we help stop it getting worse.’
52
Saturday 12 August
22.30–23.30
Gentian Llupa passed an hour, inconspicuously, at the rear of a crowded pub close to the Royal Sussex County Hospital. He sipped a Diet Coke, whilst watching a darts match that was in progress between a local team and one from Ipswich, the Thrasher Vipers, who all wore smart black-and-orange shirts. One member of this visiting team, heavily tattooed and sporting a Lincoln beard, was punishingly accurate. The Thrasher Vipers were indeed thrashing the local team, Llupa thought with a smile.
He left the pub and slipped out into the darkness. One thing he had learned as a medical student was that hospitals tended to be pretty chaotic places. Anyone could walk around the corridors and wards unchallenged. But even so, just to be safe, beneath his motorcycling leathers which were now folded and locked inside the motorbike’s pannier, he had put on blue surgical scrubs, a stethoscope round his neck and an ID tag bearing the name Dr Tojo Melville, which his boss, M
r Dervishi, had given him.
He strode down a long corridor that smelled of disinfectant and mashed potato, passing a hand sanitizer, a caged trolley, an empty wheelchair, a lift, toilets and a multicoloured sign naming the various wards on this floor. He passed a stack of empty blue and green plastic crates, two filled pink garbage bags, a row of noticeboards pinned with information leaflets, a yellow warning triangle stating CLEANING IN PROGRESS. A young, grief-stricken couple stood, hugging each other. An orderly walked past, from the opposite direction, giving him a cursory, respectful nod.
He reached the sign for Albourne Ward, Orthopaedic Unit, and stopped, peering in. Then, pulling his surgical hat low over his forehead, he approached the nursing station.
It was an open ward, comprising twenty-six beds, but to his right there were doors to four private rooms. Still no one took any notice of him. The nursing station was staffed by a pleasant-looking Asian man engaged on a phone call and two female nurses studying some paperwork. On the third door was the label STEPHEN SUCKLING.
As he hesitated outside, the door suddenly opened. A middle-aged woman, in jeans and a baggy blouse, blew the occupant a kiss and told him she would be back in the morning.
He turned his face away as she walked past him and waited until she had left the ward, then opened the door, walked in and closed it behind him.
The mechanical digger and crusher operator lay in the bed, both his legs held up by traction pulleys. He had been brought in earlier today, Llupa had been informed, with multiple fractures to the tibia and fibula in both legs, as well as fractures to his sacrum and coccyx. Much of his lower half was currently encased in plaster.
Llupa knew, from these injuries, he would not be walking again for many months and then for the rest of his life he was likely to have a severe limp. Well, he thought, that was one blessing. Stephen should be grateful to him for sparing him that suffering, no?
It was a small room, with pale-green walls and a wash basin with a soap dispenser. Above the bed was an Anglepoise lamp; there was a drip stand with two lines cannulated into the back of Suckling’s hand, two plastic chairs, a free-standing tray on which sat a glass, a jug of water and a box of tissues, and monitoring equipment with a display showing his blood pressure, 180 over 70 – High, thought Gentian – and his heart rate, 87 – Also high, he thought.
‘Hello!’ he said, breezily, to the patient. ‘How’s your day so far?’
Suckling looked at him groggily, heavily sedated. ‘Not that great, actually.’
‘Too bad. Mr Dervishi said to say hello, and how sorry he is about your accident.’
Suckling peered at the man in blue scrubs with the stethoscope dangling from his neck.
‘Mr Dervishi asked me to explain to you that this is not personal. It is simply that shit happens.’
‘Shlit shappens,’ Stephen Suckling echoed. He watched the doctor replacing one bag of fluid attached to a drip line, grateful for the care, grateful for the constant numbing of the agonizing pain he had been in before they brought him here.
Within seconds of the doctor leaving his room, he started feeling happy. Incredibly happy. Life was great.
He felt full of love. All his cares were drifting away. Everything was wonderful. Boy, would he and his wife have a celebration when he got out of here!
He was only dimly aware of a steady beep-beep-beep sound.
The monitor’s display was turned away from him so he could not see it.
The blood pressure reading began to drop, steadily and rapidly. Along with his heart rate: 62; 51; 47; 35; 22.
Somewhere out in the night, hazily, he heard the roar of a powerful motorcycle. And somewhere nearer he heard a steady beeping. It sounded like the warning from a lorry reversing.
A few minutes later, the heart rate on the monitor flat-lined.
53
Saturday 12 August
22.30–23.30
Velvet Wilde looked at her watch. It was just after 11 p.m. ‘Does Mr Dervishi know we’re coming?’
‘Yes,’ Norman Potting replied. The Detective Sergeant’s driving made her nervous – he barely looked at the road, seemingly treating it as a distraction from their conversation and from looking at her.
He drove them up a steep hill at the far eastern extremity of the city of Brighton and Hove, the posh Roedean area, with clifftop views across the English Channel. High above them, to their left and lit up like a Christmas tree, was a white, colonial-style mansion with a columned portico, surrounded by large grounds. He pulled the car up in front of tall metal gates, put down his window and pressed the button on the elaborate panel. Instantly a light shone on them.
‘Who is this?’ a guttural male voice asked.
‘Detective Sergeant Potting and Detective Constable Wilde,’ he replied.
‘You are thirty minutes late,’ the voice replied, curtly.
Potting glanced at his watch. ‘We said we’d be here at about 11 p.m. It’s now 10.55 p.m.’
‘You are thirty minutes late.’
‘No, we are not late, we are actually five minutes early,’ he said firmly in his West Country accent.
‘Mr Dervishi has gone to bed.’
Potting turned, puzzled, to DC Wilde, who frowned, then again spoke into the panel. ‘I was told Mr Dervishi would see us at 11 p.m.’
‘You wait, please.’
‘No,’ Potting said, loudly. ‘You wait and you listen. Tell Mr Dervishi that if you don’t let us in, he will be arrested. So he has the choice of seeing us now in the comfort of his home or being taken into custody and spending the night in a cell.’
‘I will speak to my boss.’
‘You do that, sonny Jim.’
Potting and Wilde sat in the car, in the darkness. ‘Can we do that?’ she asked. ‘Arrest him?’
‘We’re in a fast-time kidnap situation. Dervishi is linked to a mobile phone that’s been used by the kidnappers. You bet we bloody can.’
She smiled.
Suddenly the gates began opening.
They drove through and up the steep driveway. Four large men, almost as motionless as statues, and dressed in black, lined the drive, watching them suspiciously. As they neared the house, which had a quadruple garage to one side, two rottweilers appeared out of the shadows, barking savagely. Potting slowed the vehicle, not wanting to hit either of them, and pulled up in front of the porch. The dogs jumped up at the sides of the car. There was the piercing, high-pitched screech of a whistle and the dogs turned their heads, suddenly calming down, and padded away. Two men, sporting coiled earpieces and dressed in black suits and shirts, appeared seemingly from nowhere. One was enormous, with hair reduced to stubble and wearing dark glasses, striding with an arrogant swagger towards them. His colleague had almost ridiculously broad shoulders from working out, that seemed out of proportion to his small head, as if he had been the victim of an erroneous transplant. He had short, dark hair that finished in a widow’s peak some way down his forehead, and dense eyebrows, giving him a permanent, worried frown. In contrast to the bully-boy appearance of his colleague, he seemed less threatening.
Potting and Wilde opened their doors and got out of the car.
Dark Glasses said, ‘You are thirty minutes late.’
‘No,’ Potting said. ‘I’m telling you we are not.’
‘You are thirty minutes late. Mr Dervishi is a very punctual man, he does not like people being late. You have upset him.’
‘Really?’ Potting said. ‘Well let me tell you, he has upset a lot of people also.’ He looked at the silent man with the widow’s peak. ‘You and baldy-pops work for him, do you?’
‘He is our boss,’ he said, unsmiling.
‘Fine.’ Potting looked at each of them in turn. ‘You have a choice. Either you take us to him this minute, or you are both nicked. Under arrest for obstructing justice. Understand?’
In reluctant silence, they ushered the two detectives through the front door into an imposing hallway that, Potting thought,
could have been the entrance to a stately home. It was lined with classical oil paintings, busts on plinths and fine antique furniture, with a grand staircase at the far end. A distinct aroma of cigar smoke hung in the air.
From above they heard a cultured female voice with a trace of an Eastern European accent. ‘What’s going on, Valbone, Dritan? Is it Aleksander? Is he home?’
‘Two detectives wish to talk to Mr Dervishi, madam,’ one of the henchmen said.
‘Oh God.’
A handsome, immaculately coiffed woman in her late thirties hurried down the stairs. She wore a velour tracksuit and suede Gucci-monogrammed slippers; her hands sparkled with ornate but classy rings and she held an equally sparkly mobile phone in one. Looking at Potting and Wilde, she asked, anxiously, ‘Is this to do with Aleksander? Has he had an accident? Is he all right? Please say he’s all right, yes? I’m his mother.’
‘Mrs Mirlinda Dervishi?’ Potting quizzed.
‘Yes.’
He showed her his warrant card and explained who they were. ‘We’d like to speak with both your husband and your son very urgently, madam.’
‘Aleksander is not home. I was worried something has happened – I don’t know where he is. He was going after the football to a friend, to work on a school video project. I phoned the friend’s house a little while ago and his mother told me he never went there – unless I got it wrong and he is with other friends. I keep trying his phone and he is not answering.’ She held up her hands with a gesture of despair. ‘It’s after 11 p.m. and he is only fourteen. He was going to phone Valbone to collect him when he was ready – I—’
She was interrupted by one of the bodyguards who had greeted Potting and Wilde. He spoke to her in a harsh-sounding foreign language and immediately she looked relieved. Turning back to the detectives, she said, ‘Aleksander has just texted him, saying he will be sleeping over with his friends at a house in Hove – a different friend, I had it wrong. Everything’s fine.’ She smiled. ‘My husband is in his office. I take you.’